Celine Dion is not ready for the holidays without her husband
Relatability is the subtext of many stories on the life and times of celebrities. Are they relatable, or are they Mariah Carey? Celine Dion falls comfortably on the latter end. She's an icon. But when René Angélil, her husband of 22 years, died in January after a battle with throat cancer, she was suddenly anyone who has experienced loss. In a new interview with Page Six, Dion opens up about approaching the holidays without him for the first time.
"I can't believe it's going to be a year that my husband passed," she said. "I don't know when Santa Claus is coming, but if I had a wish to make this year, can you just tell him to take his time? I'm not ready! It's kind of a bittersweet moment and at the same time we need to really make the holidays really happy."
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The feeling is a familiar one for anyone faced with the prospect of the holiday season without a loved one. She and Angélil were married in 1994, after dating for seven years. He was her music manager and had launched her career after signing her when he was 12 years old (he famously mortgaged his home to fund La voix du bon Dieu, her first record in 1981).
See photos of the couple together throughout his life:
Dion offered a sense of how she's dealing with the fast-approaching holidays, saying, "I cannot just live on like, 'I lost my husband, my children have no father.' I have to stand tall and strong because this is my way of living: Stand tall, be positive, pick your battles, do the best you can and to live for today, not for tomorrow, for today, and know nothing is perfect, not everything you want will happen."
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The singer has stayed busy since his passing. She publicly spoke about his death in May for the first televised interview on Good Morning America. She appeared on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and came packing her best Cher impression. She got into Vetement, the impossibly expensive French brand, with a Titanic sweatshirt. She told Vogue that she was considering having her husband's heartbeat tattooed on her.
For Christmas, she'll be going on the family's traditional ski trip at the Big Sky resort in Montana with her two kids (less relatable, but, again, it's Celine Dion). Her Las Vegas residency will resume in late January, a full year after her husband's death.
"We are healing each day," she continued. "My kids are doing really well and eventually you have to just move on. Yesterday is over, tomorrow is not here yet, so today is today."
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